My personal motivation to take up the challenge to design a new core module [in programming] stems from my conviction of research-led teaching being the most effective way to keep up and enhance student enthusiasm for and engagement with the subject. I have offered and supervised projects for the Warwick URSS scheme continuously since 2006 and take the positive impact these have on undergraduates as my baseline experience.

Coming from a higher education system that operated on the principle of 'sink or swim; off you go', Yorck's ambition in teaching is to strike the right balance between challenging and supporting students. Supporting students by being responsive and providing targeted teaching material as complete as possible should only be one part of teaching students. Challenging students in order to keep up their enthusiasm and motivate them to self-study appears to be the harder part.

Once out of the classic lecture teaching format though, research-led teaching in a workshop format has been a revelation for him especially with the support of technologies like the Moodle system. His new programming module benefits from both aspects of support and challenge and he hopes to draw on best practice from this experience to transfer more and more to other teaching formats in the future.